Subplots of minor consequence overshadow the primary story, and McKinney-Whetstone's adult characters are too unreflective to win our sympathy. Pushed beyond their limits, the girls at last run away and the adults must work together to find them. The children's and adults' lives are complicated by various betrayals: Mae abuses Ramona's credit Ramona's boyfriend, Tyrone, finds comfort with another woman (while Ramona pines for Tyrone's father) and Mae's favorite cousin sexually assaults Shern. When an old criminal conviction denies custody of the girls to the aunts and uncles, the children are placed in a nightmarish foster home run by compulsive gambler Mae and her adult daughter, Ramona.
Already fragile, Clarise is hospitalized with a breakdown. Soon, three beautiful daughters-Shern, Victoria and Bliss-complete their vision of bourgeois happiness, but the repeal of Jim Crow laws lures their best customers away to white catering chains, and Finch dies in a last-ditch effort to save his faltering business. Raised by her affectionate, idiosyncratic aunts and uncles after her mother's death, middle-class Clarise elopes with a poor but talented cook named Finch, and together they open their own successful catering business. With overreaching prose and overwhelming family tangles, McKinney-Whetstone's return to black Philadelphia, this time in the 1960s, never quite lives up to the promise of her debut, Tumbling. In Tempest Rising, McKinney-Whetstone richly evokes the early 1960s in west Philadelphia in this story of loss and healing, redemption, and love. As Ramona struggles with Mae's abuse and her own hatred for the foster children, she also tries to keep at bay a powerful attraction she has for her boyfriend's father. Though Mae lavishes affection onto her foster children, she is abusive to her own child, Ramona, a twenty-something stunning beauty. The girls are wrenched from their mother and dumped into foster care in a working-class neighborhood in the home of Mae, a politically connected card shark.
When their father disappears suddenly, he is presumed dead, sending their mother spiraling into an apparent breakdown.
But their lives quickly unravel as their father's lucrative catering business collapses. Set in west Philadelphia in the early sixties, Tempest Rising tells the story of three sisters, Bliss, Victoria, and Shern, budding adolescents raised in a world of financial privilege among the upper-black-class. Class, race, and sexuality converge in this page-turning story of desire, jealousy, and survival.
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